Searching for you

Searching for you,

I found,

Eternity,

Through you,

I can see,

Through my tempest seas,

And into me,

How every moment,

And every touch,

Has brought me,

To you,

Eternally you,

I hungered,

After you,

In every life,

Through every inch of strife,

To be near you,

I chose any fate,

Thrown to earth,

I clamoured in the Guff,

And called Gods bluff,

To be near you,

I carved through stone,

And every thing I know,

Says I cannot grow,

Cannot go,

 A real day,

Without you,

I need you,

And can’t leave you,

Alone

I stand accused,

My reluctant muse,

Of thoughts unspoken,

And held too close,

Dishonest words,

And bravado jokes

I hoped my poetry,

And attempts at books you see,

Would bring you close to me,

The real side of me,

Always playing with you,

My childhood friend,

I would bend time,

To find that rhyme,

That makes you mine

Am I Kahlil?

Seeking out his cup,

Again,

In another lifetime

Even now,

I wait in vain,

And I knew how to do my thing,

Until I felt your sting,

And went bumbling within,

To find you,

And find you I did,

A million lifetimes with kids,

And every time you hid,

And teased me just a bit,

To let me know,

That I should never quit

And quit I never will,

I know your heart isn’t still,

I know it rustles and shakes,

When my voice breaks,

So, on my knees I’ll beg,

Please don’t leave me here again

Real love is Magical,

Mystical,

Spiritual

I adore you,

And want more of you,

Addiction,

To worship you,

Constantly you,

Everywhere

My pretense,

Is past tense,

Strengthened and weakened,

Leaning over your fence,

I have no defence,

It makes no sense,

Like Incense,

How long,

I burn,

For you,

Everywhere I turn,

It’s you,

And only you,

My Eternal glue,

Now unbounded,

Clearly I see you

2005: Juju’s Secret

The darkroom had unlocked the hidden secret that accompanied his elevated consciousness whenever caught in the flash of the camera … as the illustration emerged on each page when placed in the developer, he would see both the complete pasts and futures of all those he had photographed.  It was as if that lightning strike had connected him to the Universe, and by taking his mother, he had become its prescience guided child, enfolded in an inter-dimensional universe whenever light captured an image, and fixed it into time.  The camera, as he saw it, was more than a window upon the world, it was a microscope, and his gift, was being able to penetrate the mysteries of the voyeur lust that accompanies every camera purchase – a greed to capture moments in history that convey meaning about who we are, and what we want to be.  He could actually know, for those moments, everything about what was happening, and why.  The realisation left him reeling.  He had only just completed a degree in journalism and got himself a desk-job with a local paper, writing up petty (and sometimes not so petty) crimes for a senior writer, to whom he was apprenticed.  He’d always focused on writing, but he had no idea that the camera would eventually provide him with his ultimate lens on reality, so to speak.  He’d decided to take the introductory photography class more as an afterthought than an action.  What on earth could this all mean?  Was he some kind of superhero, with special powers, or was he a madman?There was nothing to do but wait and see.  

To read the previous chapter of Juju click here

Fatima Chapter 5 |1970: Newspaper Cuttings

 

She had a favourite picture of him, a newspaper cutting, which she carried in her school blazer pocket for two years until it fell out one day making her secret known to Safi.  It didn’t matter by then though, for every second girl in her school had a picture of him hidden away somewhere, and it didn’t seem at all abnormal.  It seemed quite healthy for a teenage girl to be smitten by an idol in contemporary culture.  By then, her love had grown to epic proportions.  She was one of the few girls she knew who actually had contact with him, and her personality had begun to blossom outwards from the status that brought her within the peer group.  Suleimans occupation had ensured her the opportunity of having regular contact (albeit innocent at this stage) with Shakes.

She was fifteen when he made his intentions known by starting to pay courtship visits to her home.  Who could disapprove?  He was the decent type;

“Could have any girl he wanted.”

What was it that attracted him to her?  Was it her sense of duty or her teenage infatuation and her excitability at the very sight of him, which she would never lose throughout her life.  Maybe it was all these things or maybe it was a simple desire on his part to have a girl whom he felt he could mould into a woman and thus ensure that she embodied all the characteristics he desired.  It’s not easy to tell.  History and memories can be muddled by our need to preserve what is contemporary.  Sometimes we’d rather not know the truth because it makes the present impossible to bear.  Too much history weights us down because our tools of analysis are too plain to give justice to experience.  To miss the experience is to miss it forever.  No amount of digging can reveal more than possible motivations for an action and his actions made sense in the time they occurred.  There can be no doubt that love had taken hold, and no rational explanations need be given to explain that.

There are some who believe that we never truly love more than we project affections that we have an intrinsic need to share, into somebody else.  We elevate them and invest them with qualities we wish we could enjoy forever.  When love fails, it is our failure to realise these qualities that hurt most.  We have needs, powerful needs that drive us to the limits of sanity in order to satisfy them.

Fatima had strong needs.  She’d inherited her father’s idealism.  It reflected in her need to order the world around her.  She had an expert feel for creating an ordered environment.  Everything had its place.  Strangely, this would manifest itself through her life in many ways, the ultimate of which would be her need to find a place into which she could fit herself.  It would be as if the need for order around her had actually been a need to define herself constantly, so that she could be secure and sure of the constancy of things.  This had a profound effect on the way she loved.  She invested the object of her affections with the qualities she most desired in order to preserve her need for constancy and security.  He became the ideal man.  He could do no wrong, Shakes was everything in her life.  He would be all she would need.  It was truly a naïve teenage love, and reality was still being painted into the years of her life.

She looked forward to her moments alone with him.  They were mostly supervised.  He was careful to preserve the authority of her parents, obeying the traditional manner of courtship to an admirable degree.  There was no doubting his intentions or his sincerity and he was admired by all in her family.  There were impressed by his mixture of humility and quiet charm and it was evident in his success that his quiet strength ran deep.  They were grateful of his demeanour and he soon became a guest in their home.

She adored him, doted on him, yet in her girlish way she teased him; trying here and there to provoke a response from his seemingly immovable calm.  It would be a constant theme in their love.  His contentment with himself – as if he was an individual without a need for anyone else - would always provide her with a challenge of sorts; she would always have to extract affection from him.  This was new to her, her family had always openly displayed affection and hugs and kisses were exchanged between the sexes without hesitation.  For him though, affection wasn’t for open display.  It was something that came in small doses and was dealt out in private. 

“He was almost displaced in his nature sometimes,” she thought. 

His reserve was always intact.  It was an immovable veneer which never left him, even when he angered.  This was the ultimate source of stability and security in her life; that he was immovable in this way.  It also made her feel somehow disconnected to him though, and this would be a constant source of tension for her, the oscillating desire for stability and the need to be closer to his being would drive her to behave like a girl more than a woman later in their marriage life.  Knowing him and loving him from such a young age would leave her knowing no other way to love.  He knew this, and it increased his responsibility towards her and he became, in a sense, a father to her.  It was only through this that she could trust him to be a father to her children. 

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